Mission Stardust (1967)

Mission Stardust is an out of this world space race of bad plotting, deliriously inept special effects, and characters who seem intent on proving to one another which one of them is the stupidest. That interstellar stud Perry Rhodan ended up getting a nice dose of space booty at the end of the film while evil kingpin Arkin found himself chucked out an airlock merely proves that in life, it’s only results that matter.

Rhodan is an astronaut leading a mission to the moon aboard the Stardust to find some super duper secret metal. Following some trouble with the controls of their ship, Rhodan and crew land on the moon giving him the opportunity to take his cherry moon rover out for a spin. It’s painted white and looks like the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile thus communicating his studliness to any space chicks he might happen to encounter.

They have problems with the lunar hotdog car and exit it only to see it glow and then disappear completely. Perry and fellow astronaut Bull kind of look each other and the spot where their wiener car used to be and seem to say, “huh” and walk on over to the big alien spaceship they now see just over yonder.

They encounter a tall guy in a space suit who leads them into the ship. The tall guy takes off his helmet and reveals that he is a robot. We know this because the robot head looks like a bunch of gears with some glass eyes and dentures attached to it.

Finally Rhodan and Bull meet up with some regular aliens on the ship. One of them is Crest, a dried up old fart who wears silk pajamas and the other is Thora, the only space babe you’ll see in the movie. She wears a a ridiculous outfit that looks like a Lycra body suit with two white clams pasted onto her breasts, and complimented by a platinum blonde wig so hideous it had to be of alien origin!

To be fair, the spacesuits that Rhodan and Bull were wearing appeared to be held together by black electrical tape. Of course, they’ll be wishing for them back once the aliens loan them some of their flashy orange spacesuits for the big raid on the bad guy’s island hideout. I thought I was watching a two-man assault team made up of members of Devo!

The aliens are from a highly advanced race of stuck-up jerks and like most of these hoity-toity races, their spaceship has broken down and they’ve sitting there on the moon for about six months waiting for Triple A to show up!

Another problem is that Crest is really sick. In fact, he has leukemia. Now, even though this race is really advanced and has managed to build spaceships that can break down in the middle of nowhere, millions of miles from home, they have never heard of this disease.

Incredibly, Perry happens to remember a doctor who has a leukemia serum! And Perry knows that the guy’s lab is in East Africa! And even though we don’t have enough magic serum to cure anybody on Earth, we’re going to waste it on some dried up old coot from outer space!

The film’s villain, Arkin, is unconvincingly shoehorned into this rather unsuspensful situation (who cares if the old alien lives or dies?) first via the traitor he has planted onboard the Stardust and then through the apparent sheer luck of him being in the exact part of Africa where Rhodan is going to retrieve the doctor!

Somehow, after being tipped off by the traitor, Arkin has enough time to kidnap the doctor and replace him with an exact look alike complete with two sexy nurses. Rhodan brings theses fakes aboard the alien ship and they try to take over! Which is a great plan except for the legion of killer robots the aliens have!

It is of course a doubly stupid plan because the traitor that is feeding the information to Arkin has already seen the killer robots in action when the Stardust first landed on the moon!

Not to be outdone in the brain dead department, the aliens while constantly telling us how advanced they are, are actually demonstrating that it was no accident they broke down on the moon and just sat on their space thumbs waiting for a miracle.

There’s zero security on this ship. Everyone comes and goes as they please and anyone, even humans, can operate the controls which can leave the ship vulnerable to attack.

The killer robots are only used sporadically and never to avoid trouble, only after someone’s negligence and inaction causes trouble. And why didn’t the aliens do a little research and just kidnap the real doctor on their own?

By the time you sit through unspeakably horrid scenes of flying jeeps, guys hanging in the air with visible wires, the worst shot of guy floating in space ever filmed and watched dudes fog up the glass that’s been placed in front of them to represent the aliens’ “invisible” force field, the fact that the fake doctor and nurses actually brought the real serum with them isn’t all that surprising. The theme song “Seli” though is an awesome bit of galactic grooviness.